Mitch Landrieu's tort reform

Because the mayor is pissed at this one guy holding up the WTC development, we're going to severely limit legal redress against public entities like the New Orleans Building Corps for economically disadvantaged firms and individuals.

The bill sponsored by Sen. Conrad Appel doesn't mention the World Trade Center specifically but changes what factors public benefit corporations can consider when picking a private company to lease public property. Public benefit corporations can award leases outside the standard public lease law.

The bill also requires anyone challenging a lease to pay cash or other security in order to file a lawsuit, an amount that could reach tens of millions of dollars on big projects. The bill would apply to both future and currently pending lawsuits.

Seems like an inherently bad idea. But all the important people are behind it so.. 

Swatting a fly with a very large iconic structure

I don't know if I have the exact correct perspective on this since I am not a law talking guy or a friend of the mayor's or anything.  But this seems like overkill.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration has taken its courtroom spat with a losing bidder on the World Trade Center redevelopment project to the Legislature, working with a state lawmaker on a bill that could make lawsuits over such public development projects far more financially risky.

A bill filed this week by Sen. Conrad Appel, R-Metairie, would require any company bringing a lawsuit against a public-benefit corporation — a quasi-public city agency — over its choice of a contractor on a public development to put up cash or a bond equal to the rent the agency would have received over the first few years of its lease with that contractor.

That way, should the lawsuit fail and a judge decide to award the agency damages for the delay caused by the legal proceedings, the money already would be set aside.

Otherwise, a company may have “no assets at all” but still bring a lawsuit that costs a public agency “hundreds of millions of dollars,” Appel said. “That’s why we did this.”

The bill is specifically aimed at a legal challenge already brought by Two Canal Street Investors Inc. against the city’s selection of another team of companies to redevelop the former World Trade Center building at the foot of Canal Street. But it would apply statewide.

We've mentioned before that the specific people this legislation is aimed at seem to be unsavory characters.  But does imposing a new wealth based prerequisite for filing grievance against the very often questionable decisions of public-benefit corporations in matters like this sound like the correct response?  What kind of a person would think this is ok?

State's rights vs City's rights

The City of New Orleans's legislative agenda for this session is all about who is a allowed to do what with whose permission. There's a bill that says motorists won't necessarily  have to call police to investigate every single traffic accident anymore. There's another slightly worrisome one that will allow civillains to work police barricades in the CBD during special events.  But since we're already experimenting with fake police doing actual police patrols downtown, that does seem kind of mild.

Other bills have to do with what the city itself is allowed to do on its own. The most important of these have to do with whether or not it can set its own minimum wage. Current state law does not permit municipal minimum wage laws. Another bill seeks to interfere with the city’s "sanctuary city" policing policy on immigration status.

There are other less serious but still significant checks on local governance proposed. One might halt municipal attempts at removing Confederate monuments. Another would prevent local laws banning plastic shopping bags. The article quotes Sen. Conrad Appel who suggests the state needs to step in cases where local government has gone, "beyond the pale."

Which is strange because Appel also has a bill pending that would in certain cases set a city's elected officials practically above the law.

The acrimony of the legal battle over back pay hangs over a separate bill, however. As the fight reached its climax last year, Civil District Court Judge Kern Reese said the decades-old lawsuit firefighters were pursuing against the city had gone on long enough. He held the city in contempt and ordered that Landrieu be placed under house arrest on weekends if payments didn’t start.

Landrieu never ended up in house confinement due to a last-second stay from the state Supreme Court. And this year, state Sen. Conrad Appel, R-Metairie, has filed a measure that would prevent a state court from punishing public officials for failing to appropriate money for such claims.

Louis Robein, an attorney for the firefighters, argued that would take away a tool that could be used to force the city to pay off legal judgments it owes, something state courts cannot do otherwise.

“The way this is structured, these types of judgments would essentially not be enforceable through the power of contempt,” Robein said.

Apparently unaccountably dealing in bad faith with retirees over a period of decades is not "beyond the pale." Once they come after our plastic bags, though, something has to be done.